Cezanne admired the Impressionists, especially Pissarro and
Renoir, and derived inspiration from them; it is hardly possible to imagine
his landscapes of the 1870s without their quantum of Impressionist freshness.
But the whole thrust of his work is about something other than the delight
in the fleeting moment, the "effect" of light, color and atmosphere, to
which Impressionism was dedicated. Underneath the delectable surface was
structure, like reefs and rocks beneath a smiling sea, and that was what
Cezanne sought and obsessively analyzed--the bones and masses of the world.
His famous remark about seeking in nature "the cylinder, the sphere, the
cone" need not be taken literally--he was never a geometric painter, still
less an abstract one, though later abstractionists would build on his work.
And yet his greatest paintings bear abstract constructions of tremendous
amplitude and sureness. Early Cezanne the stumblebum turned into one of
the finest manipulators of paint who has ever lived. Perhaps manipulator
is the wrong word--it suggests trickery, whereas in Cezanne the relation
between the paint surface and the imagined surface of the object (a rock,
the side of a house, an apple) is astonishingly direct and candid. This
doesn't come across in reproduction. It rises from the paint itself, that
discreet paste in which every trace left by the brush seems to help create
the impression of solidity, so that you feel you could pick the apple--which
is both a rosy sphere of light and a ball as heavy as plutonium--off the
table. And yet the surface is never closed, never overdetermined; that
is part of the magic.
Modernism's patriarch. by Robert Hughes, Time, 6/10/96, Vol.
147 Issue 24, p72, 4p, 7c CEZANNE,
Paul -- Exhibitions; ART
museums -- Pennsylvania -- Philadelphia

Iconography: Cezannes' still life works were the beginning of cubism.
They are often credited with inspiring Artists like Picasso and Braque
to go further with the ideas that Cezanne had already laid out. When one
looks at these still life's', one is inclined to say that Cezanne could
not draw accurately. The left side of the table does not meet up with the
right, the wine bottle is misshapen, and the fruit looks like it is in
danger of rolling off the tilted tabletop. But, according to Stokstad,
it wasn't that he couldn't draw, it was Cezanne showing 'willful
disregard for the rules of traditional scientific perspective.' They say
that he is merely observing the still life from many different angles and
attempting to incorporate them all into a cohesive whole. As Cezanne would
say, " Something other than realty-a construction after nature.'

Context: According to art critic Robert Hughes,

"The greater the artist the greater the doubt; perfect confidence
is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize. "As a painter,
I become more lucid in front of Nature," Paul Cezanne wrote to his son
in 1906, the last year of his life. "But that realization of my sensations
is always very painful. I cannot attain the intensity which unfolds to
my senses. I don't have that magnificent richness of coloration which animates
nature." As Picasso famously said, it's Cezannes anxiety that is so interesting.
But not only the anxiety. There are anxious mediocrity's too. It's the
achievement that counts. If Cezanne was not a heroic painter, the word
means nothing. This was evident to some of his friends and contemporaries,
such as Emile Zola. They saw, as later generations have seen, that his
painting was also a moral struggle, in which the search for identity fused
with the desire to make the strongest possible images of the Other--Nature--under
the continuous inspiration and admonishment of an art tradition that he
revered. He compared himself, not quite jokingly, to Moses: "I work doggedly,
I glimpse the promised land. Will I be like the great Hebrew leader, or
will I be able to enter it? "He was indeed the Moses of late 19th century
art, the conflicted, inspired, sometimes enraged patriarch who led painting
toward Modernism--a deceptive Canaan sometimes, not always flowing with
milk and honey, but radically new territory all the same. The essential
point, however, is that just as Moses died before reaching Canaan, so Cezanne
never lived to see Modernism take hold--and he might not have liked what
he saw, had he lived. It used to be one of the standard tropes of art history
that Cezanne "begat" Cubism, and it is a fact that no serious painter since
1890 has been able to work without reckoning with Cezanne. But the idea
that Cubism completed what Cezanne began is an illusion. It may be that
Cezanne was reaching for a kind of expression in painting that did not
exist in his time and still does not in ours. Instead of theory, he had
"sensation," the experience of being up against the world--fugitive and
yet painfully solid, imperious in its thereness and constantly, unrelentingly
new. There was painting before Cezanne and painting after him, and they
were not the same. But Cezanne's own painting matters more than its consequences.
Inevitably, this deep innovator claimed he invented nothing. "In my opinion
one doesn't replace the past, one adds a new link to it."
Yes and no. Modernism's patriarch. by Robert Hughes, Time, 6/10/96,
Vol. 147 Issue 24, p72, 4p, 7c CEZANNE,
Paul -- Exhibitions; ART
museums -- Pennsylvania -- Philadelphia

Form: The brushstrokes are more deliberate and planned than those of
the Impressionists, he is not merely trying to be painterly, but to record
the 'sensations' of nature.
Iconography: This was a mountain near Cezannes home in France, and he
painted it over thirty times during his life. According to Stokstad, The
even lighting and still atmosphere makes these paintings more enduring
when compared to way Impressionists are always trying to capture the 'moment'.
Cezanne wanted to capture a sense of timelessness and solidarity with this
impressive landscape. On the top painting, the trees in the foreground
help to create the illusion of depth and underscore the immensity of the
mountains. Even on the bottom painting, which is much looser and more abstracted,
we find the mass of trees in front, and a vast expanse of land stretching
back toward the imposing hills.
Context: According to art critic Robert Hughes,

Cezanne has often been called a universal artist, but you cannot
grasp his work unless you realize that he was a deeply local one as well.
He was not just French but southern Mediterranean French, a Provencal;
and the obsessive, enduring, reinforcing sense of the particular landscape
of his cultural memory is wound into his work so far as to completely remove
it from the domain of pure, unsymbolic form. In a sense it is part of the
great movement away from the national toward the local that characterized
so much of European, including French, culture in the latter half of the
19th century. You feel it particularly in Cezanne's series of landscapes
of his "sacred mountain," Mont Sainte-Victoire. Now it is a mere shimmer
of profile in a watercolor, whose blank paper becomes the white light of
the Midi, burning through the pale flecks of color. Elsewhere, in the late
oils, it achieves a tremendous faceted density, that crouched lion of rock.
In between there are lyrical tributes to it, as in Mont Sainte-Victoire
Seen from Bellevue, 1882-85, where it appears almost shyly on the left
of a tender, early springtime landscape, all new green, traversed by an
aqueduct (sign of the ancient Roman roots of Provence) and crossed by a
pale road whose kinks are tied to the branch forms of the pine that rises
in the foreground to bisect the canvas.

Vincent Van Gogh
Van Gogh's work and the details of his biography are so linked to his
paintings iconography that it would be almost impossible to discuss Van
Gogh without a brief overview of his life. The following is an excerpt
from the Encyclopedia Brittanica.

Early life
Van Gogh, the eldest of six children of a Protestant pastor, was born
and reared in a small village in the Brabant region of southern Netherlands.
His early years in his father's parsonage were happy, and he loved wandering
in the countryside. At 16 he was apprenticed to The Hague branch of the
art dealers Goupil and Co., of which his uncle was a partner.
Van Gogh's working life can be roughly divided into two periods. The
first, from 1873 to 1885, during which he wrestled with temperamental difficulties
and sought his true means of self-expression, was a period of repeated
apprenticeships, failures, and changes of direction. The second, from 1886
to 1890, was a period of dedication, rapid development, and fulfillment,
until it was interrupted by a series of mental crises from 1889 onward.
He worked for Goupil in London from 1873 to May 1875 and in Paris from
then until April 1876. Daily contact with works of art aroused van Gogh's
artistic sensibility, and he soon formed a taste for Rembrandt, Frans Hals,
and other Dutch masters, although his preference was for two contemporary
French painters, Jean-François Millet and Camille Corot, whose influence
was to last throughout his life. Van Gogh disliked art dealing. Moreover,
his approach to life darkened when his love was rejected by a London girl
in 1874. His burning desire for human affection thwarted, he became and
remained increasingly solitary. He became a language teacher and lay preacher
in England and, in 1877, worked for a bookseller in Dordrecht. Impelled
by a longing to give himself to his fellowmen, he envisaged entering the
ministry and took up theology but abandoned this project for short-term
training as an evangelist in Brussels in 1878. A conflict with authority
ensued when he disputed the orthodox doctrinal approach. Failing to get
an appointment after three months, he left to do missionary work among
the impoverished population of the Borinage, a coal-mining region in southwestern
Belgium. There, in the winter of 1879-80, he experienced the first great
spiritual crisis of his life. He was sharing the life of the poor completely
but in an impassioned moment gave away all his worldly goods and was thereupon
dismissed for a too-literal interpretation of Christian teaching.
Penniless and with his faith destroyed, he sank into despair, cut himself
off from everyone, and began seriously to draw, thereby discovering in
1880 his true vocation. Van Gogh decided that his mission from then on
would be to bring consolation to humanity through art, and this realization
of his creative powers restored his self-confidence.
The productive decade
His artistic career was extremely short, lasting only the 10 years
from 1880 to 1890. During the first four years of this period, while acquiring
technical proficiency, he confined himself almost entirely to drawings
and watercolours. First, he went to study drawing at the Brussels Academy;
in 1881 he moved to his father's parsonage at Etten, Neth., and began to
work from nature.
Van Gogh worked hard and methodically but soon perceived the difficulty
of self-training and sought the guidance of more experienced artists. Late
in 1881 he settled at The Hague to work with a Dutch landscape painter,
Anton Mauve. He visited museums and met with other painters. Van Gogh thus
extended his technical knowledge and experimented in the summer of 1882
with oil paint. In 1883 the urge to be "alone with nature" and the peasants
took him to Drenthe, a desolate part of northern Netherlands frequented
by Mauve and other Dutch artists, where he spent three months before returning
home, which was now at Nuenen, another village in the Brabant. He remained
at Nuenen during most of 1884 and 1885, and during these years his art
grew bolder and more assured. He painted three types of subjects--still
life, landscape, and figure--all interrelated by their reference to the
peasants' daily life, to the hardships they endured, and to the countryside
they cultivated. Émile Zola's Germinal (1885), a novel about the
coal-mining region of France, greatly impressed van Gogh, and sociological
criticism is implicit in many of his pictures--e.g., "Weavers" and "The
Potato Eaters." Eventually he felt too isolated in Nuenen.
His understanding of the possibilities of painting was evolving rapidly;
from studying Hals he saw that academic finish destroys the freshness of
a visual impression, while the works of Paolo Veronese and Eugène
Delacroix taught him that colour expresses something by itself. This led
to enthusiasm for Peter Paul Rubens and a sudden departure for Antwerp,
where the greatest number of Rubens' works could be seen. The revelation
of Rubens' simple means, of his direct notation, and of his ability to
express a mood by a combination of colours proved decisive. Simultaneously,
van Gogh discovered Japanese prints and Impressionist painting. His refusal
to follow academic principles led to disputes at the Antwerp academy, where
he was enrolled, and after three months he left precipitately in 1886 to
join his brother Theo in Paris. There, still concerned with improving his
drawing, van Gogh met Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Paul Gauguin, and others
who were to play historic roles in modern art. They opened his eyes to
the latest developments in French painting. At the same time, Theo introduced
him to Camille Pissarro, Georges Seurat, and other artists of the group.
By this time van Gogh was ready for such revelations, and the changes
that his painting underwent in Paris between the spring of 1886 and February
1888 led to the creation of his personal idiom and style of brushwork.
His palette at last became colourful, his vision less traditional, and
his tonalities lighter, as may be seen in his first paintings of Montmartre.
By the summer of 1887 he was painting in pure colours and using a broken
brushwork that is at times pointillistic. Finally, van Gogh's Postimpressionist
style crystallized by the beginning of 1888 in masterpieces such as "Portrait
of Père Tanguy" and "Self-Portrait in Front of an Easel," as well
as in some landscapes of the Parisian suburbs.
After two years van Gogh was tired of city life, physically exhausted,
and longing "to look at nature under a brighter sky." His passion was now
for "a full effect of colour." He left Paris in February 1888 for Arles,
in the southeast of France.
In his pictures of the following 12 months--his first great period--he
strove to respect the external, visual aspect of a figure or landscape
but found himself unable to suppress his own feelings about the subject.
These found expression in emphatic contours and heightened effects of colour.
Van Gogh's pictorial style was not calculated, however, but spontaneous
and instinctive, for he worked with great speed and intensity, determined
to capture an effect or a mood while it possessed him. His Arles subjects
include blossoming fruit trees, views of the town and surroundings, self-portraits,
portraits of Roulin the postman and other friends, interiors and exteriors
of the house, a series of sunflowers, and a "starry night."
Van Gogh knew that his approach to painting was individualistic, but
he also knew that some tasks are beyond the power of isolated individuals
to accomplish. In Paris he had hoped to form a separate Impressionist group
with Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec, and others whom he supposed to have similar
aims. He rented and decorated a house in Arles with the intention of persuading
them to join him and found a working community of "Impressionists of the
South." Gauguin arrived in October 1888, and for two months they worked
together; but, while each influenced the other to some extent, their relations
rapidly deteriorated because they had opposing ideas and were temperamentally
incompatible.
On Christmas Eve 1888, van Gogh broke under the strain and cut off part
of his left ear. Gauguin left, and van Gogh was taken to a hospital. He
returned to the "yellow house" a fortnight later and resumed painting,
producing a mirror-image "Self-Portrait with Pipe and Bandaged Ear," several
still lifes, and "La Berceuse." Several weeks later, he again showed symptoms
of mental disturbance severe enough to cause him to be sent back to the
hospital. At the end of April 1889, fearful of losing his renewed capacity
for work, which he regarded as a guarantee of his sanity, he asked to be
temporarily shut up in the asylum at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in order
to be under medical supervision.
Van Gogh stayed there for 12 months, haunted by recurrent attacks, alternating
between moods of calm and despair, and working intermittently: "Garden
of the Asylum," "Cypresses," "Olive Trees," "Les Alpilles," portraits of
doctors, and interpretations of paintings by Rembrandt, Delacroix, and
Millet all date from this period. The keynote of this phase (1889-90) is
fear of losing touch with reality and a certain sadness. Confined for long
periods to his cell or the asylum garden, having no choice of subjects,
and realizing that his inspiration depended on direct observation, van
Gogh fought against having to work from memory. At Saint-Rémy he
muted the violent colours of the previous summer and tried to make his
painting calmer. As he repressed his excitement, however, he involved himself
more imaginatively in the drama of the elements, developing a style based
on dynamic forms and a vigorous use of line (line often equated with colour).
The best of his Saint-Rémy pictures are thus bolder and more visionary
than those of Arles.
Van Gogh himself brought this period to an end. Oppressed by homesickness--he
painted souvenirs of Holland--and loneliness, he longed to see Theo and
the north once more and arrived in Paris in May 1890. Four days later he
went to stay with a homeopathic doctor-artist, Paul-Ferdinand Gachet, a
friend of Camille Pissarro and Paul Cézanne, at Auvers-sur-Oise.
Back in a village community such as he had not known since Nuenen, four
years earlier, van Gogh worked at first enthusiastically; and his choice
of subjects such as fields of corn, the river valley, peasants' cottages,
the church, and the town hall reflects his spiritual relief. A modification
of his style follows: the natural forms in his paintings are less contorted,
and in the northern light he adopted pale, fresh tonalities. His brushwork
is broader and more expressive and his vision of nature more lyrical. Everything
in his pictures seems to be moving, living. This phase was short, however,
and ended in quarrels with Gachet and feelings of guilt at his inescapable
dependence on Theo (now married and with a son) and his inability to succeed.
In despair of ever overcoming his loneliness or of being cured, he shot
himself and died two days later. Coincidentally, Theo died six months later
(Jan. 25, 1891) of chronic nephritis.

Vincent Van Gogh, The Starry Night, 1889
oil on canvas 28x36" Metropolitan New York
Form:
The texture of this painting is fairly rough because Van Gogh used thick
impastos of paint. Van Gogh also used straight umodulated out of
the tube colors. The dominant colors here are primary tones.
Van Gogh rendered most of the forms using outlines and contour lines and
did not rely on value or chiaroscuro to define or describe his subjects.
In a way, this is more of a drawing with paint than a painting. The
brushstrokes in the sky are designed in sweeping large curvilinearcounterbalancing
strokes. Van Gogh's application of short dashes of colour one next
to another is a demonstration of impressionist style optical mixing.
This is demonstrated especially in how he applied the blues of the sky.
The composition is asymmetrical.
The large cyprus tree in the foreground dominates the image and its shape
is echoed by the church's steeple in the background.

Iconography: This was painted while Van Gogh was locked up in an asylum
in Saint-Remy, France. It was, of necessity, painted from memory unlike
most of the rest of his work, which was painted either outdoors or as a
still life.
The dominant elements in this painting are the sky, the stars in it,
and the cypress tree in the foreground. The fact that the sky is
like a sea in motion could be read in any number of ways: as a clue as
to the turbulence of Van Gogh's state of mind and or possibly an illustration
of the unknown forces that move the universe. The moon seems to radiate
energy, but it does not appear friendly, or gentle, as one would imagine
moonbeams to be. Instead it imitates the radiating waves one would find
when a stone is dropped in a pond, disruptive.
The cypress tree in the foreground were often used as gravemarkers and
were planted as memorials over graves. In my interpretation, (Mencher's)
the large tree in the foreground seems to connect the earth and the sky
in a way that the steeple in the background cannot hope to. This
may possibly be Van Gogh's own ideas of the role of man in the world versus
the role of nature in God's plan. This idea being very similar to
St.
Augustine's ideas concerning the "City of Man and the City of God."
This is similar to Masaccio's interpretation in his painting The Tribute
Money.
Context: Van Gogh was extremely religious in his early years, before
he took up painting as an avocation. There is speculation that there is
significance to the fact that there are eleven stars in the sky, taken
from the Old Testament in the bible; the story of Joseph, " 'Look, I have
had another dream,' he said, ' I thought I saw the sun, the moon and eleven
stars bowing to me,' " Genesis 37:10

Room in Arles, 1889
Van Gogh

Form: The texture of this painting is fairly rough because Van
Gogh used thick impastos of paint. Van Gogh also used straight umodulated
out of the tube colors. The dominant colors here are primary tones
except for the yellow ochres and oranges used for the bedposts. Van
Gogh rendered most of the forms using outlines and contour lines and did
not rely on value or chiaroscuro to define or describe his subjects.
In a way, this is more of a drawing with paint than a painting.
The entire image has a rather fisheye lens look to it and the perspective
seems a bit off. There are two possible reasons for this. One
scholar has explained that Van Gogh's room's walls angles were actually
just a touch off. This is actually true because one can actually
see the house today, but there are also some other visual discrepancies.
Some of the vertical lines in the seem to sway or curve. The pictures
lean out just a bit too far and the vertical and horizontal lines are not
consistent with the laws of linear perspective.
Two other explanations exist. Van Gogh was careless, which at
times he was and he may have been forced to sit so close to the canvas
that he unconsciously incorporated the distortions that naturally occur
when sitting to close to a painting. He was unable to move away from
the painting to check the visual problems.

Iconography: As in the "Starry Sky" the formal elements
may be an expression of Vincent's internal world. This painting was
done in Vincent's own room in Arles. Note the cramped composition, the
disproportion of the bed, the saturation of colors, and the odd angle of
the paintings hanging over the bed. This, while done from life, does not
accurately represent an external reality, it seems to represent his own
'internal' reality.
Van Gogh was taken care of by his older brother Theo. As a result, he
was allowed a certain amount of self-pity and malaise that other men his
age and bearing could not afford to indulge themselves in. Theo sent him
to Arles to 'rest', and Van Gogh was in a state of poverty and under-nourishment
while living there, as well as hallucinations and acute depression. This
resulting painting, nervous and cramped appearing as it is, is an accurate
reflection on how he felt at the time, like the walls were pressing in
on him, and all he could do was sleep. Like the religious fervor he had
embraced earlier in life, Van Gogh became as equally obsessed with painting
once he had decided it was his true calling, and felt that he must put
on canvas the myriad demons within his own troubled mind.
Context: According to www.vangoghgallery.com,

" Vincent's Bedroom in Arles is one of the artist's best known
paintings. The striking colours, unusual perspective and familiar
subject matter create a work that is not only among Van Gogh's most popular,
but also one that he himself held as one of his own personal favourites..
because Van Gogh was so pleased with the painting he described it at great
length in letters to his family. In fact, Vincent describes this painting
in no less than thirteen letters and, as a result, a great deal is known
about the artist's own feelings about the work. In a letter to his
brother, Theo, Vincent wrote:

' My eyes are still tired by then I had a new idea in
my head and here is the sketch of it.
Another size 30 canvas. This time it's just simply my bedroom,
only here colour is to do
everything, and giving by its simplification a grander style
to things, is to be suggestive here
of rest or of sleep in general. In a word, looking at the picture
ought to rest the brain, or rather
the imagination. The walls are pale violet. The floor is of
red tiles. The wood of the bed
and chairs is the yellow of fresh butter, the sheets and pillows
very light greenish-citron.
The coverlet scarlet. The window green. The toilet table orange,
the basin blue.
The doors lilac. And that is all--there is nothing in this room
with its closed shutters.
The broad lines of the furniture again must express inviolable
rest. Portraits on the walls, and
a mirror and a towel and some clothes.
The frame--as there is no white in the picture--will be
white.
This by way of revenge for the enforced rest I was obliged
to take.
I shall work on it again all day, but you see how simple
the conception is. The shadows and
the cast shadows are suppressed; it is painted in free
flat tints like the Japanese prints. It is
going to be a contrast to, for instance, the Tarascon
diligence and the night café.'

Van Gogh
Landscape with snow, 1888

Form and Iconography: The colors used in this earlier work are calm,
almost peaceful. Though he is using the short brushstrokes, they are not
filled with the tension and anxiety found n his other works. The asymmetrical
composition is sweeping, this is a view of an entire field, leading off
into the distance.
It is said that Van Gogh was happiest when the weather was nice and
he could be outdoors painting. Though plagued with mental instability
and a string of failed relationships with women of questionable repute,
there were occasional breaks in his unhappiness. This painting would clearly
be a reflection of his ability to enjoy and observe nature. It also puts
to rest the theory that Van Gogh was an untalented artist. As we can see
here, when it pleased him to do so, he could paint quite beautifully as
well as accurately capture the world he saw around him.
Context: Van Gogh was never happy in big cities, and his appreciation
for the outdoors is often shown by the time he takes to render his landscapes.

Sower with Setting Sun, 1888
Van Gogh

Form: Ink was on paper. Looking much like an etching this is done with
ink and a paintbrush. The main figure is just off to the side enough to
make the work asymmetrical, and it also has a nice gestural and loose feeling
to it.
Iconography: This image is based on a similar work called the "Sower"
by Millet. It is an illustration or representation of the Parable
of the Sower as told by Jesus in which he likens the toils of the sower
to our own journey through life. "That if one sows a good seed one
will reap a good crop."
This story and the image that he borrowed from Millet would have had
a particularly strong resonance for Van Gogh because he was very religious.
As a quick study, this is a good piece of work. Once again, we see the
joy that Vincent has while outdoors. The figure is of a man sowing grain
for his harvest, which could indicate the connection between earth and
man, symbolizing the connection that Van Gogh himself felt for the earth.
In the back, the sun is uncharacteristically huge and round, and its' rays
are depicting shining outward from it. This gives it an energy and a sense
of happiness it would not have had if the sun were absent from this work.
Context: In 1885, while still in the Netherlands, Van Gogh had focused
much of his artistic energy doing studies and representations of the poor
peasants he encountered. It seems he had an affinity for those who had
to work hard to make a living, and he may here be hearkening back to those
days.
These drawings were actually done after Van Gogh had already made a
painting of the same subject.

Self Portrait, 1889
Van Gogh

Form: Expressionistic self portrait, done in oils with non-local
colors and thick heavy brushwork.
Iconography: This is one of many self portraits done by Van Gogh. It
was at this time in his life that he had met and worked with Gauguin in
Paris. They had a seemingly temperamental relationship, at first best friends
but then having many near violent falling outs. Van Gogh's mental health
seemed to worsen during this time, and looking at this painting one can
see evidence of his descent into a nervous breakdown. He is swirling the
background around his figure, which suggests an anxious energy and tension.
He has used sickly greens and yellows in the both the highlights and shadows
of his face, and the look he exudes is intense and troubled. If we look
at his upper body, it appears as though he is about to hunch his shoulders
forward, or move in some way to suggest protecting himself, and his mouth
is set in a definite frown. This unhappiness can be attributed to the fact
that Vincent was cooped up in a house for the winter with his sometime-friend
Gauguin, and his failed friendship and love life was getting too much for
him to bear.
Context: " The relationship between Van Gogh and Gauguin deteriorated
throughout December, however. Their heated arguments became more and more
frequent--"electric" as Vincent would describe them. Relations between
the pair declined in tandem with Vincent's state of mental health. On 23
December Vincent van Gogh, in an
irrational fit of madness, mutilated the lower portion of his left
ear. He severed the lobe with a razor, wrapped it in cloth and then took
it to a brothel and presented it to one of the women there. Vincent then
staggered back to the Yellow House where he collapsed. He was discovered
by the police and hospitalized at the Hôtel-Dieu hospital in Arles.
After sending a telegram to Theo, Gauguin left immediately for Paris, choosing
not to visit Van Gogh in the hospital. Van Gogh and Gauguin would later
correspond from time to time, but would never meet in person again."
www.vangoghgallery.com

Cemetery in the snow, 1885
Van Gogh

Form: Early oil painting, symmetrical and well crafted. earthen palette
and realistic representation.
Iconography: One of the earlier works done by Van Gogh, while living
in the Netherlands. He was new to painting, and as such was working
very hard to paint accurately and well in order to gain credibility. He
has painted this scene of a cemetery probably as he saw it and was working
hard to maintain realism. Cemeteries were nothing new to Van Gogh, in fact
it is speculated that they may have played a part in his unhappy mental
state. Before Vincent was born, his mother had been pregnant with a boy,
who was stillborn. His parents named it Vincent and buried it in a graveyard
close to their home. His mother became pregnant very soon after and Vincent
Van Gogh was born exactly one year to the day the other baby had been stillborn.
His mother used to take Van Gogh to the graveyard every year on his birthday
to visit the grave. It is speculated that the young Vincent was traumatized
by constantly seeing the gravestone with his name and birthdate as the
date of death for the unfortunate baby.
Context: Whether it is true that it led to his subsequent depression
and insanity or not, Van Gogh was still familiar with the setting of a
graveyard and did an exquisite job capturing the silence and stillness
of this scene.

Vincent (Starry, Starry Night)
Lyrics and Music by Don McLean
Starry, starry night
Paint your palette blue and gray
Look out on a summer's day
With eyes that know the darkness in my soul
Shadows on the hills
Sketch the trees and daffodils
Catch the breeze and winter chills
In colors on the snowy linen land
Now I understand
What you tried to say to me
And how you suffered for your sanity
And how you tried to set them free
They would not listen, they did not know how
Perhaps they'll listen now
Starry, starry night
Flaming flowers that brightly blaze
Swirling clouds in violet haze
Reflect in Vincent's eyes of china blue
Colors changing hue
Morning fields of amber grain
Weathered faces lined in pain
Are soothed beneath the artist's loving hand
Now I understand
What you tried to say to me
They did not listen, they did not know how
Perhaps they'll listen now
Starry, starry night
For they could not love you
But still your love was true
And when no hope was left inside
On that starry, starry night
You took your life as lovers often do
But I could have told you Vincent
This world was never meant for one as
beautiful as you
Starry, starry night
Portraits hung in empty halls
Frameless heads on nameless walls
With eyes that watch the world and can't forget
Like the strangers that you've met
The ragged men in ragged clothes
The silver thorn of bloody rose
Lie crushed and broken on the virgin snow
Now I think I know
What you tried to say to me
How you suffered for your sanity
How you tried to set them free
They did not listen they're not listening still
Perhaps they never will...

Gauguin
from Encyclopædia Britannica "Gauguin," (Eugène-Henri-)
Paul
Early years.
Gauguin was the son of a journalist from Orléans and of a mother
who was half French and half Peruvian Creole. After Napoleon III's coup
d'état, the Gauguin family moved in 1851 to Lima, and four years
later Paul and his mother returned to Orléans. At the age of 17
he went to sea and for six years sailed about the world in freighters or
men-of-war. In 1871 he joined the stockbroking firm of Bertin in Paris
and in 1873 married a young Danish woman, Mette Sophie Gad. His artistic
leanings were first aroused by his guardian, Gustave Arosa, whose collection
included pictures by Camille Corot, Eugène Delacroix, and Jean-François
Millet, and by a fellow stockbroker, Émile Schuffenecker, with whom
he started painting. Gauguin soon started going to a studio to draw from
a model and receive artistic instruction. In 1876 his "Landscape at Viroflay"
was accepted for the official annual exhibition, the Salon. He developed
a taste for Impressionist painting and between 1876 and 1881 assembled
an impressive group of paintings by Édouard Manet, Paul Cézanne,
Camille Pissarro, Claude Monet, and Johan Barthold Jongkind.
Gauguin met Pissarro in 1875-76 and began to work with him, struggling
to master the techniques of drawing and painting. In 1880 he was invited
to contribute to the fifth Impressionist exhibition, and this invitation
was repeated in 1881 and 1882. He spent holidays painting with Pissarro
and Cézanne and made visible progress, though his early works are
often marred by clumsiness and have drab colouring. Gauguin thus became
more and more absorbed by painting, and, in 1883, when the Paris stock
exchange crashed and he lost his job, he decided "to paint every day."
This was a decision that changed the course of his whole life. He had a
wife and four children, but he had no income and no one would buy his paintings.
In 1884 Gauguin and his family moved to Copenhagen, where his wife's parents
proved unsympathetic, and his marriage broke up. He returned to Paris in
1885, determined to sacrifice everything for his artistic vocation. From
then on he lived in penury and discomfort, his health was undermined by
hardship, he became an outcast from the society to which he had belonged
and could never establish himself in any other, and he came to despise
Europe and civilization.
In 1886 the expressive possibilities of colour were revealed to him
in the pictures of Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, and he began to occupy
himself with this aspect of painting at Pont-Aven, Brittany. Gauguin then
had two decisive experiences: a meeting with van Gogh in Paris (1886) and
a journey to Martinique (1887). The one brought him into contact with a
passionate personality who had similar pictorial ideas and tried to involve
him in working them out communally; this attempt came to a disastrous end
after a few weeks at Arles in 1888. The other enabled Gauguin to discover
for himself the brilliant colouring and sensuous delights of a tropical
landscape and to experience the charm of a primitive community living the
"natural" life. Gauguin decided to seek through painting an emotional release,
in consequence of which he reacted against Impressionism. The key to his
artistic attitude from 1888 on is to be found in these significant phrases:

Primitive art proceeds from the spirit and makes use of nature.
The so-called refined art proceeds from sensuality and serves nature. Nature
is the servant of the former and the mistress of the latter. She demeans
man's spirit by allowing him to adore her. That is the way by which we
have tumbled into the abominable error of naturalism.

Break with Impressionism.
Gauguin therefore set out to redeem this error by "a reasoned and frank
return to the beginning, that is to say to primitive art." A possible method
for arriving at a new form of pictorial representation was suggested to
him by Émile Bernard, a young artist well acquainted with stained
glass, manuscripts, and folk art. He pointed out that in these arts reality
was generally depicted in nonimitative terms and that the pictorial image
was made up of areas of pure colour separated by heavy black outlines.
Such was the origin of the style known as Cloisonnism, or Synthetism, which
attained its most expressive possibilities in such paintings by Gauguin
as "The Vision After the Sermon" , "Bonjour Monsieur Gauguin!," and "The
Yellow Christ" (1889).

Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) -
Bonjour, monsieur Gauguin, 1889.

"The Yellow Christ" (1889)

When Gauguin broke with his Impressionistic past, he gave up using lines
and colours to fool the eye into accepting the flat painted image as a
re-creation of an actual scene and explored instead the capacity of these
pictorial means to induce in a spectator a particular feeling. His forms
became ideated and his colours suggestive abstractions. Maurice Denis,
in Théories (1920), described a small painting executed by Paul
Sérusier under Gauguin's direction in 1888; this landscape seemed
to have no form as a result of being synthetically represented in violet,
vermilion, Veronese green and other pure colours. . . . "How does that
tree appear to you?" Gauguin had asked. "It's green isn't it? All right,
do it in green, the finest green on your palette. And that shadow? Isn't
it blue? Well then, don't be frightened of making it as blue as possible."
Thus [writes Denis] was presented to us for the first time, in a paradoxical
but unforgettable manner, the fertile conception of a painting as "a flat
surface covered with colours arranged in a certain order."
Gauguin indulged in "primitivism" because he could make a more easily
intelligible image; his simple colour harmonies intensified this image;
and, because he wanted his pictures to be pleasing to the eye, he aimed
at a decorative effect. His purpose in all this was to express pictorially
an "idea." It was as a result of this that he was acclaimed as a leading
painter of the Symbolist movement. Gauguin's whole work is a protest against
the soul-destroying materialism of bourgeois civilization. "Civilization
that makes you suffer. Barbarism which is to me rejuvenation," he wrote
(1891) to the Swedish playwright August Strindberg. So Gauguin installed
himself in Brittany (Pont-Aven and Le Pouldu, 1889-90, 1894), Tahiti (1891-93,
1895-1901), and the Marquesas Islands (1901-03), where he could paint scenes
of "natural" men and women.
Before 1891, Gauguin tended to flatten things deliberately, and his
effect was often strained, but throughout the 1890s his primitivism became
less aggressive as the influences of J.-A.-D. Ingres and Puvis de Chavannes
led to increasingly rounded and modeled forms and a more sinuous line.
This process can be followed in works such as "Nafea Faa Ipoipo" (1892;
"When Shall We Be Married?"), "Nave Nave Mahana" (1896; "Holiday"), and
"Golden Bodies" (1901). Simultaneously, Gauguin's images became more luxuriant
and more naturally poetic as he developed his marvellously orchestrated
tonal harmonies. His chief Tahitian work--"Where Do We Come From? What
Are We? Where Are We Going?"--is an immense canvas painted in 1897-98.
This is the consummate expression of much that he had painted in the previous
six years, and the aura of dreamlike, poetic inconsequence which surrounds
this semiphilosophical allegory of primitive life is most powerful.
From 1899 on, Gauguin became increasingly ill and was continually in
pain; he was also involved in frequent rows with the governing authorities
for siding with the natives against them. Yet despite melancholy, his last
pictures still have serenity and hope.
Influence.
In 1889-90 a group of young followers had gathered round him at Pont-Aven,
including Sérusier, Charles Filiger, and Denis, who transmitted
Gauguin's ideas to Édouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard. The Norwegian
painter Edvard Munch owed much to Gauguin, as did the painters of the Fauve
group--Henri Matisse in particular--who profited from his use of colour.
Gauguin's primitivism and stylistic simplifications greatly affected the
young Pablo Picasso and led to the aesthetic appreciation of black African
art and hence to the evolution of Cubism. In Germany, too, Gauguin's influence
was strong.
Gauguin was unique in his ability to hold a mysterious balance between
idea, perception, and visual image. His pictures make their effect visually,
not as a result of literary overtones. He was a great stylistic innovator,
and, when he rejected the conception of a picture as a mirror image of
an actual scene and turned from an empirical to a conceptual method of
pictorial representation, his influence was wide and long-ranging.

Form: This oil on canvas painting exhibits intense, saturated, non-local
colors. Gauguin’s paint quality is spotty and thin and in general
his brushstrokes are not as thought out or visible as Van Gogh's.
Gauguin’s work is not really about an illusionistic tradition. The
forms are often very flat and almost feel as if they are forms cut out
of colored paper. Gauguin doesn't concern himself much with chiaroscuro,
value or perspective in most of his paintings.
Iconography: Gauguin was a friend of Van Gogh, and the two often painted
each other. This paining is showing Van Gogh in the process of creating
the work for which he is most famous for, Sunflowers, and
shows him with his characteristic bright red beard.
Context: Gauguin was married and had five children, he became unemployed
when the bank he was working for went through some financial difficulties.
Free to pursue his dream of painting full time he moved to Arles, where
the living was cheaper, and there struck up a friendship with Van Gogh.
He also went to Denmark, but then disappointed at not being able to sell
his paintings, came back to France and lived at Pont-Aven, before embarking
off to Tahiti.

Form: Oil on canvas, red is the primary color used for the ground,
instead of the expected green, and everything is pushed forward and crowded
into the picture plane. Space and the illusion of space is
basically ignored except for in the size scale relationship of the figures
in the foreground compared to the wrestling angel in the background.
Iconography: Gauguin painted this work while living in the small town
of Arles. There was a small community of devoutly religious people whom
lived there and he was so impressed with their almost fanatical belief
that he painted this as a representation of some of the women having a
vision of Jacob wrestling with the angel. Jacob stole his brothers' birthright,
and Esau, his brother went out to kill him. Jacob hid out for 20 years,
built up great wealth and family, and decided to make it all up to his
brother. He sent many gifts to him before he journeyed forth to find him,
and while on the road ran into what is interpreted to be an angel. He wrestled
with the angel, was wounded in the process, but won, and was renamed Israel.
He was given the angels blessing and all turned out okay in the end. It
has been speculated, because the Bible does not truly make clear who exactly
the
person was in the road, that it could be an allegory for Jacob wrestling
with his conscience, guilt, or with God.
Context: If we are to assume that Gauguin was trying to say anything
about his respect for these women and their devotion, it could have been
that he was feeling guilt for having left his wife and five children behind
while he pursued his dream of painting.

Form: Oil on canvas, a bit of a departure from the early impressionist
style Gauguin had adopted while painting with Van Gogh. There is still
much non-local color in the skin tones, and perhaps because of the religious
name of the painting, his adopted style is somewhat flat and Byzantine.
Iconography: Gauguin, tired of being a failure in France, eventually
moved to Tahiti to live permanently. He became enthralled with the locals,
their lifestyle seemed to encompass the bohemian and religious ideals that
he had been unable to attain. That is, walking around in states of what
he would consider 'undress', the slow pace of the island, and that he was
respected as a painter by the locals. He was just as exotic to him as they
were to him. Because of his overwhelming adoration for this lifestyle,
he began to paint the people around him as religious icons, in this case
the Virgin and Child. Interestingly, his paintings sold better in France
now that he did not live or paint there.
Context: By now, Gauguin had left his wife and children for good and
had very little contact with them.

Form: Oil painting with a markedly more subdued palette, and an almost
cubist feel to it. Note that he way the girl is tilted off the bed is reminiscent
of a Cézanne still life.
Iconography: Gauguin was a scalawag of the highest order. With five
children and a wife in France he found himself a thirteen-year-old girl
as a lover. This is a portrait he painted of her in their shared bungalow.
The story has it that she would wake up screaming from nightmares, knowing
that her relationship with Gauguin was wrong, and pronounce that the spirits
of her dead ancestors were watching them as they slept and disapproved
greatly. This painting also follows in the tradition of French artists
like Ingres and Manet, where the painting is all about the male gaze and
the naked female form. It also recalls the idea of Orientalism, 'exotic'
things and people in 'exotic' places.
Context: Though Gauguin may have decided to adopt the island life, he
could not seem to leave behind his Eurocentrism and style of panting. He
may have felt that he was being terribly creative, but in truth he was
merely recycling the same themes and settings that have been passed down
through all European Art Academies.

Form: Form: Seurat's style is called "pointalism" because Seurat painted
by putting dots of pure color one next to the other. When the viewer
moves away from the painting the dots are mixed together by our eyes.
This optical mixing is very similar to what happens with the individual
pixels on the computer.
Seurat's color were often the most pure and saturated hues available
and in order to modulate the colors he would often place a dot of a complimentary
color next to another in order to desaturate the colors. Often he
would place two primary colors next to another in order to creat a secondary
color. By placing a blue dot next to a yellow one he could create
a green field.
Make sure you click the picture to get a close up view of it.
Iconography: The Eiffel tower is a much better subject than people for
Seurat, especially because of his 'scientific' and analytical view of painting.
because of the cooler colors used for the sky, and the warmer colors used
for the tower, he was able to create a definition between the man made
building and nature. It also worked to create a sense of atmospheric perspective,
as though we are seeing the tower through the fog of early morning.
Context: Seurat was a native of France, so the Eiffel tower was a fairly
common and familiar sight for him.

Georges Seurat, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande
Jatte
1884-86
Oil on canvas Art Institute of Chicago
Pointalism/Post Impressionism
According
to art critic Robert Hughes,

The "scientific" painter with his abstruse color theories recedes
somewhat, and an inspired lyricist comes to the fore--a 19th century Giorgione.
As the art historian Robert L. Herbert puts it in his catalog essay, Seurat
"wanted to be perceived as a technician of art, and so he borrowed from
science some of the signs of its authority, including regularity and clarity
of pattern. "But, as Herbert points out, Seurat's dots are not really dots
either. Far from laboring away at a mechanical surface programmed in advance
by theories of complementary color, Seurat displayed the most intuitive
and mobile sense of the relations between sight and mark. One of the miracles
of his art is his ability to analyze light, not through the simple juxtaposition
of dabs of color but by a layering of tiny brush marks built up from the
underpainted ground, so that the eventual surface becomes a fine-grained
pelt, seamless and yet infinitely nuanced, from which captured light slowly
radiates.

Against the cult of the moment. by Robert Hughes. Time,
9/23/91, Vol. 138 Issue 12, p74, 2p, 3c, 1b HTML
Full Text
Iconography: Seurat was disdainful of the practice of Sunday afternoon
strolls in the park, as they were covers for peoples' naughtiness. Much
like an 'afternoon delight', the park was where married men would go to
dally with their mistresses, unemployed men would lay on the grass and
smoke, and women would bring their unruly children to run rampant. If you
look at the right side of the painting, you will see the woman with the
umbrella walking with the man. She has a pet monkey on a leash and there
is a dog frolicking near it. The woman is the mistress, the monkey
is a symbol of an 'exotic pet', which the woman would herself be considered
to be, and the dog is a symbol for fidelity, of which the man seems to
have none of.
According to www.artchive.com

"Seurat spent two years painting this picture, concentrating
painstakingly on the landscape of the park before focusing on the people;
always their shapes, never their personalities. Individuals did not interest
him, only their formal elegance. There is no untidiness in Seurat; all
is beautifully balanced. The park was quite a noisy place: a man blows
his bugle, children run around, there are dogs. Yet the impression we receive
is of silence, of control, of nothing disordered. I think it is this that
makes La Grande Jatte so moving to us who live in such a disordered world:
Seurat's control. There is an intellectual clarity here that sets him free
to paint this small park with astonishing poetry. Even if the people in
the park are pairs or groups, they still seem alone in their concision
of form - alone but not lonely. No figure encroaches on another's space:
all coexist in peace. "This is a world both real and unreal - a sacred
world. We are often harried by life's pressures and its speed, and many
of us think at times: Stop the world, I want to get off! In this painting,
Seurat has "stopped the world," and it reveals itself as beautiful, sunlit,
and silent - it is Seurat's world, from which we would never want to get
off."

Context: According to art critic Robert Hughes,

Seurat, like Masaccio or Mozart, was a true prodigy. Born in
1859, he succumbed to an attack of galloping diphtheria in 1891, at 31.
This all too early death has had the effect of concentrating his life around
a single stylistic effort, the invention of pointillism. The one thing
everyone knows about Seurat is that he painted rather stiff pictures composed
of dots, in the belief that this system of breaking down color into its
constituent parts was scientific and not, like Monet's Impressionism, intuitive.
Had he lived as long as Monet, Seurat would have been a hale duffer of
70 when his many heirs, like Mondrian, were coming into their maturity
as artists. What would he have left behind him by then? Possibly--if one
can guess from his last big paintings like Chahut, 1889-90, and Cirque,
1890-91-something quite different from the calm,composed "Egyptian" classicism
of his best-known work, the sublime Un Dimanche a la Grande Jatte of 1884-86.
For the last paintings are more frenetic, more consciously urban and, above
all, more influenced by mass culture (the posters of Jules Cheret, for
instance) and working-class entertainment (fairgrounds, circuses, cafes
concerts) than anything he had made before. We would then remember Seurat
not only as a great synthesizer of classical order and modernist perception
but also as the artist who fused both with the exacerbated delights of
the mass culture that was emerging at the turn of the century: the true
"painter of modern life," as anticipated by Baudelaire. The history of
modern art, in terms of its engagement with "low" culture, might then have
been quite different. Because he died so young, we have the first artist
but only hints of the second.
Against the cult of the moment. by Robert Hughes.
Time,
9/23/91, Vol. 138 Issue 12, p74, 2p, 3c, 1b HTML
Full Text

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